


The Five Times Sam Hated Bucky and the One Time He Didn’t

by tuesdaymidnight



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: 5+1 Things, Banter, First Kiss, M/M, Pining, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Sam Wilson Needs a Hug, Steve Rogers Is a Good Bro
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-12
Updated: 2016-05-12
Packaged: 2018-06-07 20:17:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6822436
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tuesdaymidnight/pseuds/tuesdaymidnight
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I hate you," Sam said to Bucky as they lay on the floor of the Leipzig/Halle Airport. Except he doesn't really hate Bucky, not even close, not even a little bit, not even at all. Takes place directly after <i>Captain America: Civil War</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Five Times Sam Hated Bucky and the One Time He Didn’t

**Author's Note:**

> Someone had to do it. I volunteer as tribute.
> 
> And thank you to [donnersun](http://archiveofourown.org/users/donnersun/), [OnTheTurningAway](http://archiveofourown.org/users/OnTheTurningAway/), and [sapphirescribe](http://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphirescribe/) for the betaing/hand-holding.

1-

Sam couldn’t figure out why it hurt so much to know that Steve didn’t trust him with the information right away. It was a perfectly logical explanation, and rationally he knew Steve was right--which didn’t usually happen.

“It’s not that I don’t trust you, Sam. Of course not. But Ross has eyes and ears on you,” Steve said before they parted ways after the unmarked jet that had helped them escape from “The Raft” dropped them off at some undisclosed safe house in what looked like the Alps.

“But he’s okay?” Sam blurted out, much to his own surprise. It wasn’t the question he intended to ask. And he definitely hadn’t meant to sound so concerned. Maybe his short prison stay had affected him more than he thought. Bucky Barnes had been the thorn in his side for the last two years.

Steve looked at Sam curiously.

“I think he will be. He agreed to be, uh, out of commission until the HYDRA programming could safely be removed.”

Sam nodded. He knew what Steve was getting at, but the thought of Bucky agreeing to be put back in a stasis tube, agreeing to be treated like a lab rat--it didn’t sit well with Sam.

“You talk to Nat about any of this? She might know someone.”

Steve looked away. They hadn’t had time to talk about how hurt Steve was by Natasha’s decision to sign the Accords. Sam actually appreciated that she was cool-headed enough to not be ruled by blind loyalty. Sam didn’t know if he would have been able to sign even if Steve had; he was done being a government pawn. But he understood Nat’s reasoning; she was a spy, not a soldier. To her the play was to make it seem like you were submitting in order to get leverage.

Steve shook his head. “She got us the jet, though.”

It was a loaded statement, but Sam wasn’t up for sorting through it. He wanted a hot shower, a warm meal, and a bed that he could fully stretch out on.

It was only the next morning when he was sitting at the safe house’s kitchen table, eating perfect croissants that Wanda had managed to acquire from a tiny bakery in town, waiting for the UN to pull their heads out of their asses, that he started to sort through the mess in his head. And that’s when he realized why he couldn’t shake his concern for Bucky.

“Dammit,” Sam said and banged his head on the kitchen table.

“What’d the table to do you?” Scott asked around a mouthful of flaky pastry.

It only made Sam bang his head down harder.

 

2-

After Riley, Sam ignored the bi in his bisexuality and dated women exclusively. He measured every guy up against Riley and no one measured up.

Bucky Barnes _definitely_ didn’t measure up. He was an ex-assassin with a scrambled up brain. And a sense of humor. And a sense of self-awareness that didn’t seem possible after what he had been through. And thighs that Sam wanted to grab onto while Bucky rode him hard--dammit.

He kept trying to talk himself out of it. He didn’t really know Bucky--hell, he didn’t even know if _Bucky_ knew Bucky. But after trying to track him down for two years, all of Steve’s stories, and fighting along side him, Sam felt like he knew him.

The thing he really hadn’t been ready for was that Bucky was a snarky asshole. It made sense. After all, Steve was Captain Sassy, and that clearly wasn’t a new development in his personality since being pulled from the ice. If Steve really thought Bucky was worth all of the trouble they’d gone through, then that meant something.

And if Sam was really being brutally honest with himself, there was something appealing in how dangerous Bucky was, how absolutely fearless. Sam probably should have examined the dark recesses of his psyche more closely given that he was turned on by danger, but he gave himself a break. He was going stir crazy still stuck in a safe house, probably in Switzerland, staring out the window at a mountain like he was in _The Sound of Music_.

“Hmm,” he heard behind him.

He spun around to see Wanda looking at him with startled eyes.

“What?”

“ _The Sound of Music_? I wouldn’t have thought you were a musical fan.”

“Were you in my head?” Sam accused.

“I didn’t meant to! You were thinking very loudly.”

“Son of a--how much did you, uh, hear?” There was no use in getting mad. It wasn’t like he could take any of it back.

Wanda bit her lip and looked away from him before replying softly.  

“Barnes does have very nice legs.”

Sam banged his head against the window.

 

3 -

Sam was surprised that their escort back stateside was Nat. They didn’t hear much from Steve, but he did make it a point to check in every other day. Conversations were short and never about Bucky, a fact which made Sam both grateful and antsy as hell.

But he didn’t dare ask. Steve could be freakishly observant, and Sam was hoping that his stupid little crush on the Winter Soldier would just go away.

Nat was piloting the plane alone, so Sam took the co-pilot seat. He didn’t know where he and Natasha stood anymore and now was as good a time as any to figure that out.

“You’re free so long as you keep a low profile,” was the only thing she had said to all of them before berating Clint for missing Nathaniel’s first steps.

Sam had a thousand questions, most of which he didn’t even really want an answer to. Being on a need-to-know basis was something he actually felt pretty comfortable with, and, given the way his life was going, he wasn’t sure he’d believe 90% of it anyway. But there was some information about a certain former HYDRA assassin that was starting to feel imperative.

It always pissed Sam off when his straight friends complained about how they didn’t understand women. He would always say, “It’s not that hard. Treat them like a person and listen to them.” But Nat was harder to read than anyone he had ever met, and getting information from her was like pulling teeth.

“So Stark got the charges dropped?” he tried.

“Apparently Rumlow’s virus would have destroyed humanity,” she said drily. “That helped your case.”

“This mean we have to play nice with Tony if we want to suit up again?”

“Basically,” Nat said, not taking her eyes off the inky sky. “Or just wait for the next alien invasion.”

“You hear much from Steve?”

“Wilson,” Natasha said, followed by a heavy sigh. “We don’t have to do this. Just ask what you want to ask.”

“Damn spies,” he muttered. “Why don’t you just tell me what I want to know so I don’t have to ask?”

“You look especially pathetic right now, so I’ll humor you.”

“I am not pathetic.”

“I said you _looked_ pathetic. And you do. But I had a contact who had undocumented intel on Barnes’ condition. They’re close to cracking it.”

They sat in silence for a few minutes while Sam tried to guess what that meant, how Natasha knew, and where the hell they were going.

“I barely know him,” Sam said.

“Doesn’t matter. Sometimes you just know.” Her voice said she knew exactly what he meant, and it was information he filed away in his mind. Natasha didn’t make being friends with her easy so he clung to the scraps she did share.

“It’s not like--anyway, it doesn’t matter,” Sam replied, figuring Natasha would understand if anyone would.

Natasha made a noncommittal noise.

“You want to say something, Romanoff?”

“He took a widow’s bite for you. I was aiming for your wings, and he jumped in front of it.”

“Doesn’t mean anything. With three flyers on your side, the wings were one of our key assets. That was just the smart tactical maneuver.”

“He also came out of nowhere to throw me into a truck when I tried a second time. Gave me a concussion.”

“That asshole,” Sam muttered. “I can take care of myself.”

He could have sworn he heard Natasha laugh.

 

4-

Sam’s life just kept getting weirder. He went from a veterans’ counselor, to a HYDRA target, to an Avenger, to an international criminal, to a Secret Avenger. And now he was living with his cohorts in a warehouse in Brooklyn that had been turned into apartments. Nat left for days at a time, Scott was in and out--mostly lugging in electronic junk that started filling up his room, and sometimes Steve showed up for a day or two. But that first month it was mostly him and Wanda.

They had pretty much nothing in common, little in the way of shared life experience, but they managed to bond over the Food Network and then the subsequent cooking experiments that resulted. They never talked about what she saw in his head, and Sam’s crush on Bucky seemed to be fading--or at least Sam tried to convince himself that it was fading.

He chalked it up to a fluke--intense situation, weird hormone spike, whatever.

Steve had been gone for nearly two weeks when the burner phone that arrived in their mailbox earlier that day rang.

“Steve?” Sam said into the phone before realizing that was probably a stupid thing to just blurt out, even if the phone was a burner.

Steve’s voice sounded tinny. “They think they can get it all out.”

“You trust ‘em?”

“I do. You want me to send a plane?”

Sam’s heart started to pick up.

“Why do you think I’d want to be there?” He was aiming for casual, but even he knew he sounded anything but.

“Do you want to have this conversation over the phone or do you want me to send the jet that I already sent before I called you?”

So that’s how Sam found himself in a high-tech lab in Wakanda six hours later. As soon as the jet landed, an escort took him right to Steve. Sam didn’t even have time to notice the time difference or the jet lag. Steve didn’t say anything to Sam; he was standing very still staring at the tube. Bucky looked peaceful, none of the fierceness or danger that constantly swirled around him was there. Sam couldn’t help but wonder if that’s what Bucky would look like sleeping.

He tried to tell himself he didn’t want to find out. He put his hand on Steve’s shoulder in what he hoped was a comforting gesture.

A guy in a lab coat turned to Steve in question.

“Do it,” Steve said.

A green gas was injected into the tube.

“To sedate him for the procedure,” the man, presumably a doctor, said.

Then the tube was opened and another guy in a lab coat came in to put a helmet attached to a bunch of wires over Bucky’s head. At the computer, the first doctor started punching in commands. A few electrical zapping noises came from the helmet, but that was it. It was kind of anticlimactic, especially after Sam had seen video footage of Hydra’s methods of mind erasure.

They waited in tense silence after the procedure was over. Sam wanted to offer Steve some comfort, but it was Steve who reached out and touched Sam’s arm.

Bucky blinked a few times as the anesthesia wore off. One of the doctors was in his face right away, shining a light in his eyes, but it was long enough for Bucky to glance over at Steve and Sam and give them a grim smile.

Once the doctors were satisfied, and after Steve tried the known trigger words, the Wakandans left them alone for a few minutes. It was probably to report to King T’Challa, but Sam was appreciative anyway. Steve looked like he was about ready to cry.

As soon as the door closed, Steve stumbled forward and wrapped his arms around Bucky, squeezing him until Bucky started pushing him away.

“I’m happy to see you too, pal, but I need to breathe.”

Steve took big enough step away that Bucky was able to look over his shoulder right at Sam.

“I didn’t know you cared.”

“I don’t,” Sam said, but he could feel the smile threatening to expose itself. Whatever they had done meant Bucky finally had a shot at autonomy.

“So, what then, you just here on vacation?” Bucky asked.

“I hate you,” Sam replied, but this time his grin was splitting his face.

 

5-

Everything was different after the Wakandans gave Bucky a clean bill of mental health, a new vibranium arm, and Steve whisked him back to Brooklyn. It meant Steve was around more, which boosted everyone’s morale. It meant that Sam finally figured out that their new “mission” involved a not-so-dead S.H.I.E.L.D. director and a whole race of superhumans.

But mostly it meant that Sam managed to regress into a pigtail-pulling 13-year-old.

“Who drank all my chocolate milk?” he shouted toward the living room where most of the team had gathered to watch Game 4 of the World Series. It was the first Windy City Series since 1906--before even Steve or Bucky had been born--a fact they both delighted in bringing up.

“That was yours?” Bucky said, sauntering into the kitchen. He had taken to loungewear like a duck to water, and was probably the only person in the world who could make gray sweatpants and a navy blue t-shirt look like pure sex.

“I put my initials on it!” Sam insisted.

“Well, S W backward is W S,” Bucky started.

“Your intellect never fails to impress me.”

“W S. Winter Soldier. You might have been saving it for me.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You know chocolate is my favorite,” Bucky said with what could definitely be considered a very directed leer.  

Before Sam could come up with a reply, Bucky had grabbed the bowl of popcorn off the table and sauntered back out to the living room.

Sam tried to focus on building the perfect nachos.

“I don’t care. You know that right?” Steve said, startling Sam into dumping the whole jar of jalapenos onto the plate. Oh well, that only meant more nachos for him and Wanda. “I mean, I care because I love Bucky and he’s my family, but I don’t have a problem with it.”

“What are you talking about?” Sam said, whipping around to glare at Steve’s implication.

“This isn’t coming out right,” Steve said, shaking his head.

“He means that’s he’s cool that you want to fuck his best friend,” Natasha said, coming into the kitchen, grabbing a beer out of the fridge, and walking back out.

Sam and Steve dropped their jaws in tandem.

“I’m not…” Sam started, but denial was futile.

Sure it had been three months since Bucky’s return, and Sam had been spending a lot of time with him. But it was never one-on-one. They did intel gathering, trained together, helped Wanda learn more about her powers, but always as a group or some combination thereof.   

He and Bucky bickered constantly, sure, but that didn’t mean anything. Sam bickered with Scott, too. Sometimes Wanda and Nat. Yes, maybe no one else made him feel like everything else in the world was muted. Maybe he didn’t feel compelled to spend every waking moment with anyone else. Maybe no one else challenged him in all the right ways the way Bucky did.

God, he had it so bad.

When Sam went out into the living room the only empty seat was right next to Bucky on the couch.

“Saved you a seat,” Bucky said loudly.

Everyone else in the room snickered.

“I hate all of you,” Sam muttered.

 

+1

After spending most of the day testing new wings in Tony’s new lab, Sam came back home the next evening to a suspiciously empty warehouse. Empty expect for Bucky, who was sprawled across one of the couches in the living area reading a book.

“Where’s Steve?”

“Out.”

“Nat?”

“Out.”

“Wanda?”

“Out with Vision. Told me not to wait up.”

“Clint?”

“Home on a farm in Iowa. You’re stalling.”

“Stalling? Why would I be stalling?”

Bucky carefully picked up a bookmark off the coffee table, marked his spot, and set the book down. Then he stood up and started walking toward Sam.

“Do I make you nervous? HYDRA programming’s out. I’m not going to snap.”

“I know,” Sam said, even though he knew Bucky was mostly making a joke. None of the others, even Steve, seemed to get that Bucky needed to joke about it, that humor was a genuine coping mechanism.

“Then what is it that has you standing in the doorway like you’re thinking about running away?”

Sam sighed. This was it. This was the moment he was dreading. The moment when Bucky finally called him out for his crush and then shot him down.

“You know,” Sam said, resigned.  

“I know a lot of things, Bird Boy. You’re going to have to be more specific.”

“You know that I--are you really going to make me say it?”

“That I know you think you can sing even though you’re always off key? That you talk to Red Wing like he’s an actual bird? That you put Splenda in your coffee but pretend like you drink it black? You’ve got to be more specific here.”

Bucky was smiling as he stalked toward Sam. When he licked his lips it finally--finally--hit Sam that maybe this wasn’t a game of gay chicken for Bucky. Steve had always talked about the girls Bucky dated--Sam was an idiot.

“I hate you,” he said, mostly to himself.

“Except you really don’t.”

Sam buried his face in his hands, not ready to look at Bucky. Not ready to face the fact that as soon as he looked into those open, inviting, clear gray eyes that he was completely and utterly doomed.

“So that _is_ the ‘it’ we’re talking about,” Bucky said. Sam could practically hear the smirk on his face.

“Can you just let me scrape my pride off the floor here and…” He trailed off because he found himself being pressed against the door by 200 pounds of thick muscle.

“You like me,” Bucky said, smiling. But it wasn’t his cocky smirk. It was his genuine smile, the one he saved pretty much only for Steve and the stray cats he fed out back.

“I am regretting this. I am regretting every moment of my life that has led me to this moment.”

“You are not.”

“I am. I wish I had done my morning run on a treadmill three years ago.”

“You don’t--”

Sam couldn’t take another second of Bucky not making a move, so he grabbed a fist full of Bucky’s t-shirt and pulled him in.

Their teeth clacked together. It was messy and probably technically one of the worst first kisses Sam had ever had. But it was perfect.

Everything he hadn’t been able to say, Sam put into the kiss. He kept his death grip on Bucky’s shirt so he couldn’t pull away. But when Bucky tried to crowd into his space even closer, thrusting his tongue insistently into Sam’s mouth with a deep growling noise, Sam let himself touch. He ran his hands through Bucky’s stupid thick hair and then slid them down to grab a handful of Bucky’s ass.

“We could have been doing this months ago if you had just fucking said something,” Bucky said in a rough voice after he pulled away a tiny fraction.

“You could have said something too, you asshole.”

“I’m a brainwashed assassin. You’re a damn counselor. Shouldn’t you be the one who’s better at this?”

“I hate you,” Sam said. “I mean it this time. You are the absolute worst.”

“Will you hate me less if I suck you off?” Bucky asked. There was genuine question in his voice, and that tiny bit of vulnerability made Sam’s heart break just a little.

“Probably,” Sam said, finally feeling like maybe for once he had the upper hand in the situation.

Of course, that feeling only lasted for the three seconds it took for Bucky to unbuckle his belt and sink down to his knees like some blow-job-giving expert.

Somehow, Sam thought he could live with it.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [tumblr](http://tuesdaymidnight.tumblr.com) or [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/tuesdaymidnight) so we can cry about Sebastian Stan together.


End file.
